In Memory of My Remarkable Student Byron Goundrey (1988-2007)

 

We are now entering the fifth year of the US invasion of Iraq. Civil war is devouring the country, but most Iraqis agree with the tens of thousands of Shia who marched in Baghdad to mark the anniversary of its fall. They chanted: “Death to America” and “Leave, Occupier! Leave!” They know that the original motivations for the invasion no longer matter. Well over a million Iraqi citizens are dead or wounded. Between half and three quarters of the population is unemployed. More than a hundred thousand have been driven from their homes. The national infrastructure is in ruins; security is non-existent; the dinar has no value; crime is rife; oil production has sunk below pre-war levels; one third of the population lacks decent drinking water; and one quarter of Iraqi children are suffering from malnutrition. No one suggests any longer that the sacrifices were “worth it”: Iraq has been labeled among the top five “failed states” and “the most dangerous place on earth” by the United Nations.

 

The United States has also paid a high price (albeit not nearly as high as the Iraqis) for the catastrophic policy decisions of the Bush Administration. Well over three thousand American soldiers have been killed, ten times that many wounded, and the moral standing gained from 9/11 is a thing of the past. A recent poll of 28,000 people worldwide shows that — overwhelmingly — the three countries seen as the greatest threat to peace are Israel, Iran, and the United States. In every country and in every region this war has generated anger against the United States and an increasing skepticism with respect to its values and motives in world politics. Sixteen American intelligence agencies collaborated on a report stating that, since the invasion began, Islamic fundamentalism has been strengthened and the appeal of terror has increased everywhere in the world. Iran has become the dominant power in the region thereby opening the prospect of yet another war or, better, an expansion of the existing war led by the United States

 

When asking how Iraq was lost, therefore, it is important to view the larger picture or, better, how the larger picture has been ignored. Not only the neo-conservative clique, who championed the Iraqi invasion, has sought to develop explanations that deny their own culpability. It has been the same with those mainstream liberals who collaborated out of cowardice, were taken for a ride, and now wish to abandon the sinking ship. As for the mainstream media, its reporters and pundits happily popularized the rubbish that friends and “well placed sources” told them. None of them remember a thing — other than their bravery in reporting “all the news that’s fit to print” — and there remains only the quest for the next story. Then there is the intelligence community and major figures in the State Department who feel their advice was not heeded and that the neo-cons in power manipulated their analyses — except that they were very quiet in the beginning and it was not as if a flood of resignations in outraged protest rocked Washington DC.

 

Consensual support existed for the invasion of Iraq that derived from consensual assumptions. Unless these assumptions are brought to light, most likely, “pragmatic” liberals will again endorse pulling the trigger once the next set of nitwits come up with their next plan to export democracy and human rights through the barrel of a gun. That is what makes it necessary to consider the mainstream arguments for why the debacle took place. Four positions have been articulated in terms acceptable to the political mainstream –- the same mainstream that brought us the war and greeted it with such acclaim in the first place. Each of them will be discussed in turn.

 

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The most widely held view for the failure in Iraq concerns the incompetence of those running the military enterprise. That this interpretation should be so popular only makes sense since it simply recapitulates arguments already made familiar toward the close of the preceding debacle: the Vietnam War. The refrains echo: not enough troops were employed, equipment was shoddy, and too much emphasis was placed upon air power. A situation thus emerged in which as soon as a city fell to the invading troops, because the American military was undermanned, these same troops would almost immediately be redeployed to deal with another city thereby constantly allowing the enemy to regroup. As all this was going on, moreover, the hands of military men were tied by the coarse instrumental concerns of “politicians” or the fuzzy “humanitarian” ideals propagated by liberals and their media.

 

Of course, not a word was said about any of this when President Bush proclaimed: “mission accomplished.” His ratings skyrocketed; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was hailed as a hero; and the Democratic Party scurried to identify itself with the victorious leader of the nation. The American military was lauded everywhere as the best equipped army on earth and, since everyone assumed that only a minority of Iraqis opposed the American presence, troop deployment was not an issue while continued resistance was considered merely residual. As for the hands of the military leaders being tied — a wave of nationalism accompanied the war and the Bush Administration was given what amounted to a blank check both by its mainstream opponents and by the “liberal” media.

 

This kind of argument is content to suggest that the plan was good and that, merely, the execution poor. It assumes that the great bulk of the Iraqi public was just waiting for an introduction to American “values” and ready to embrace the invaders as well as their puppet regime. None of this, of course, was the case. For all the talk of “integrating” former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, and the Sunni chieftains that gave it support, this view of events gives little attention to the long-standing ethnic divisions and religious tensions among the masses of Iraqis. It also essentially ignores what might be termed the “sociocide” — the complete destruction of the social infrastructure and its norms — that the invaders perpetrated in Iraq. Or, to put it a different way, this interpretation is content to concentrate upon the United States and its ability (or inability) “to get the job done” while the price paid by the Iraqis fades from view.

 

The second mainstream interpretation of the debacle in Iraq is based upon the failure of the American intelligence apparatus or, better, the manipulation of intelligence by the Bush administration. The now famous “Downing Street Memo” of 1 May 2005, minutes of a meeting taken by British national security aide Matthew Rycroft — whose veracity is now generally acknowledged — makes clear that Rumsfeld and his friends understood the difficulty in presenting “a good case” for war. Essentially admitting that American intervention would contravene international law, they thus found it “necessary to create the conditions” that would either make it legal or justify its illegality. All the major players in the Bush Administration knew that there was no firm evidence of weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam Hussein was not connected with al Qaeda, and that his regime did not pose a genuine threat to the United States. Nevertheless, because military intervention had already been decided upon, intelligence was used less to guide policy than to justify the original interventionist predispositions of the policymakers.

 

The self-serving political manipulation of intelligence by the Bush Administration obviously had disastrous implications. Exiled Iraqis like Ahmed Chalabi also purposely misinformed both their neo-conservative allies in the White House as well as gullible media hacks like Judith Miller of The New York Times. They gave wild accounts not only about their political popularity, and the wonderful reception that the American troops would enjoy, but also about the supposed terrorist connections and military capacity of the Iraqi regime led by Saddam Hussein. But there is a sense in which this gullibility was self-imposed. “Liberal” supporters of the invasion, furthermore, have taken to manipulating the public outrage over manipulation of information by the Bush Administration. Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) has claimed that “if we knew then what we know now” no vote on the war would ever have been taken in the Congress. Yet information contrary to that offered by the mainstream media and the bulk of the official intelligence community was all over the web in the months preceding the war. Democrats fearful of bucking the nationalist trend simply did not listen to experts like Scott Ritter, Hans Blix, and Mohamed El Baradei. In reality, whatever the degree to which official and mainstream intelligence was manipulated, critical information was easily available for those willing to seek it.

 

Opposing the war was not very difficult: it demanded courage and a willingness to see clearly rather than “more information.” No one asked what interest a secular regime headed by Saddam Hussein would have in making cause with Islamic fundamentalists. No one wondered how it was that a nation spending $4 billion dollars a year on the military would pose a threat to another nation spending more than $400 billion dollars a year. No one questioned how 30,000 bombs could be dropped on Baghdad in the first week of the war with only a few hundred casualties as a consequence. No one suggested that destroying Iraq might leave Iran as the dominant power in the region. It was not necessary to have reams of intelligence reports at one’s fingertips to figure any of this out.

 

Interpretation number three rests on the claim that the debacle ultimately derived from the refusal of the United States to turn over power to the Iraqis –- or, better, the “right” Iraqis — quickly enough. But then the idea that “if only we had trusted the right people” — is also an old refrain in imperialist circles. It highlights the arrogance of those “insiders” who substituted arbitrarily selected personal testimony –- or, better, simple gossip — for knowledge of real conditions. This argument has been forwarded in various venues by neo-conservatives like Richard Perle. It is also the position now taken by his friend Ahmed Chalabi, a completely corrupt businessman later accused of acting as a double agent for Iran, who was virtually anointed by the Bush Administration to lead the new Iraqi government. Had friendly politicians like Chalabi been given power quickly, so the argument runs, Iraqi and American interests could both have been served.

 

Unfortunately, however, this seemingly noble interpretation veils the desire by American imperialist policymakers to identify the interests expressed by their Iraqi friends in the political and economic elite with those of the Iraqi people. As it happened, Chalabi turned out to be a fraud: he had no support whatsoever among the Iraqi people and his party received 0.5% of the vote in the December 2005 elections. Left hanging is also a basic fact of political life in Iraq following the fall of Saddam: any set of leaders, friendly or not, would have had to face the lack of an army, a police force, a functioning bureaucracy, and a dilapidated infrastructure. The hidden intimation of this argument is that an American “occupation” of Iraq would create resentment and resistance on the part of its people. Better to use the tried and true method of employing puppets. Nevertheless, ignored is the question of just how much legitimacy everyday Iraqis were willing to provide a new provisional government that was installed by the United States and that could only have been run by leaders of private militias whose primary loyalty was less to the nation than to diverse religious and ethnic constituencies.

 

The fourth, and final, interpretation of why the war was lost is the exact opposite of the interpretation above. It suggests that the basic mistake lay in giving the Iraqis too much power too soon. This position also becomes a testament to the good intentions of the Bush Administration and its lack of ulterior motives in pursuing its course in Iraq. Of course, again, there is nothing new about this kind of claim when it comes to American foreign policy. Rumblings of this sort were heard as various puppet regimes of the United States fell during the Cold War and, again, especially when it came to the collapse of the South Vietnamese “republic.” Ingratitude with respect to the “gift of freedom” that was bestowed upon the Iraqis by the United States, mixed with a kind of patronizing bigotry regarding the incompetence of the subaltern people in question, merge in this particular view of American interaction with the once colonized world. The classic line supporting this interpretation of what took place in Iraq was provided by the columnist Charles Krauthammer who wrote: “We have given the Iraqis a republic and they do not appear able to keep it.”

 

In dealing with this interpretation, ironically, it is useful to consider the notion of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that the American troops should not be involved in nation-building: they were not to serve as policemen — hence the looting that took place immediately after the fall of Saddam and the emergence of the militias; they were not to serve as aid workers — hence the spread of hunger and the deterioration of the health system; they were not to serve as arbitrators or bureaucrats — hence the corruption, inefficiency, and patronage of the new regime. With respect to the everyday functioning of the state, therefore, the United States did hand over power to the Iraqis. The problem was that the new government was never sovereign, always dependent upon support from the United States, and thus lacking legitimacy for most Iraqis no matter what their ethnic or religious backgrounds.

 

Of course, there are always limits concerning the degree of pressure that can be applied to a puppet regime by its ruler. But there is something profoundly misleading about claiming that the United States somehow gave too much autonomy to its puppet-regime in Iraq. Every meaningful strategic military decision since the fall of Saddam was made by the United States. Paul Bremer and his team of advisors attempted to introduce a free market by fiat. But this decision would help only the thousands of American contractors and the few huge corporations close to the Bush Administration, like Bechtel and Halliburton, whose “reconstruction” projects were mostly marked by incompetence and staggering levels of corruption. More than three thousand American soldiers have been killed and roughly ten times that many have been wounded, and the defense budget for 2008 will be close to $650 billion dollars. The war is now costing $2 billion per week and total costs will exceed what was wasted on the debacle in Vietnam. It beggars reality to claim that the United States would spend what will ultimately amount to $2 trillion without controlling the allocation of resources and the most important political and military decisions of the war.

 

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So much for the popular interpretations of how Iraq was lost. Interesting is the way in which each of them elides the need for reflection upon the most basic assumptions influencing the ultimate decision to invade Iraq. It would seem that the mainstream media has a great deal of trouble dealing with the American exercise of power and the world’s view of American hegemony. What remains unexplored is the presupposition not only that the United States had the “right” to engage in a “pre-emptive strike,” and lie to the entire world about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and supposed threats to the national interest in order to justify its policy, but that the rest of the world was — or, at least, should have been — grateful for the decision of the American government to pursue such an action. Or to put it another way, taken singly or together, the reigning explanations of how Iraq was lost leave untouched questions concerning the arrogance of power and the implications of understanding the United States as an “empire.”

 

None of the popular explanations deal with the way in which especially the once colonized world might view the heavy-handed policies that brought about the Iraqi debacle let alone how its citizens might view a debate between those who claim “we gave them too much autonomy” as against “we gave them too little.” All of this references only the way in which the United States should continue its role as the world’s policeman. The long standing ethnic conflicts and the civil war in Iraq, which were sparked by the invasion, are largely ignored. The suffering of the Iraqi people and the destruction of the country, if they are mentioned at all, become secondary matters or unfortunate examples of “collateral damage.” As for national resistance against the occupier, its character remains unexamined in favor of emphasizing the ingratitude of the Iraqi people or the incompetence of the puppet regime.

 

They also ignore any discussion of the more “imperial” motivations that virtually every media outlet in the world highlighted. Surely part of the reason for the lack of support given the United States by the Iraqis, and also the rest of the world, were the blatantly self-interested gains that were to be achieved. Corporate giants like Bechtel and Halliburton may not have “caused” the war but they certainly benefited in contracts amounting to billions of dollars. Appropriation of oil may not have been the primary motivation for the Iraqi invasion, since anyone would have realized that the costs of the enterprise would surely outweigh the costs of its procurement, but the thought of increased control over its sale and distribution to enemies of the United States undoubtedly influenced those who planned the debacle. Toppling an enemy like Saddam Hussein and creating a regime friendly to the United States would, in a similar vein, geo-politically serve its aims and those of allies like Israel and the doddering monarchy of Saudi Arabia. Making good on such economic and geo-political interests, however, would obviously assume the continued presence of American troops in Iraq. The mainstream interpretations will have none of this. Nevertheless, the seemingly inexplicable lack of an “exit strategy” becomes understandable with the rather simple suggestion that the United States was intent upon preserving military forces to guard the oil bases and heighten its geo-political presence in the region.

 

Amid the greatest debacle in the history of American foreign policy, finally, there is barely a hint of critical discussion concerning the impact created by the extraordinary outbreak of nationalism and the re-emergence of what Richard Hofstadter termed “the paranoid streak” in American politics following the terrible attacks of 9/11. A feeling emerged of “us against them” that was fueled by constant reminders of the dangers attendant upon “appeasement” and media attempts to identify Saddam with Hitler. Introducing the specter of Nazism, without any sense of the radically different historical and geo-political circumstances prevailing in the 1930s, made the invasion more palatable. The need for action rather than appeasement in order to combat “terrorism,” even though no evidence suggests that Saddam Hussein was connected with al Qaeda, helped create the belief that the United States stood above international law and that it could simply ignore world public opinion in pursuit of its policy in Iraq. The supposedly singular tragedy of 9/11 — as if no other country had ever experienced anything as horrible — also served to justify a demand for vengeance against “the Arabs” and the exercise of military might to extinguish what remained of the “Vietnam trauma.” Such celebratory nationalism and provincial paranoia inspired a belief that the new “enemy” — a convenient replacement for the communists — was motivated more by hatred for the “American way of life” and its “freedoms” than by the policies pursued by the United States in the Middle East. This, in turn, helped generate a climate of contempt for all critics of American policy and inhibited a serious assessment of the looming dangers attendant upon the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.

 

What makes the prolongation of the agony in Iraq even worse is that the vision of an oil rich, self-sufficient, secular democracy with a reconstructed infrastructure has become a pipedream and that the extent to which the existing Iraqi government relies upon the United States is the extent to which it will lack legitimacy in the eyes of its citizenry. No less than during the build-up to and the aftermath of the invasion, once again, the American mainstream media is abdicating its responsibilities. Its explanations of what happened in Iraq have raised no meaningful issues and yielded nothing of value for reflecting upon future events. The pity is that such a discussion is all the more necessary given that American diplomacy — if that word still has any meaning — is basically attuned toward three options: threats, sanctions, and military force. Bombing along the borders of Syria and Iran has already taken place and “warnings” of possibly “drastic” action have been extended to the Sudan. The propaganda machine is ready to be revved up at a moment’s notice and it is only due to the weariness of the American public induced by failure in Iraq, and the over-extension of American troops, that yet another military conflagration has not broken out.

 

There remains the steadfast refusal to understand how the rest of the world views the American empire. There remains the unwillingness to see the terrible sacrifices borne by those who suffer the consequences of its decisions. There remains the blindness toward those objective conditions and constraints on action in lands about which most Americans, including policymakers, know very little. There remains the naïve underestimation of self-serving economic and geo-political interests influencing the formation of American foreign policy. There remains the inability to grapple with the celebratory nationalism and paranoia that have played such a strong role in the history of the United States. All of this, which is so steadfastly ignored by mainstream interpretations of events, provides the backdrop for what took place in Iraq. The failure of American policy is not a function of what transpired following the “occupation.” The road to ruin began with the first lie, the first bombing, and the first steps that led to the invasion of Iraq.

 

 

*Stephen Eric Bronner is the Senior Editor of Logos. Currently Distinguished Professor (Professor II) of Political Science at Rutgers University, his most recent book is Peace Out of Reach: Middle Eastern Travels and the Search for Reconciliation (University Press of Kentucky).

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